mustang heart
by sweetwatersong
Summary: Deals, horses, hearts and arms: some things aren't meant to be broken. [Clint/Natasha, Wild West AU.]


**mustang heart**  
>rating: pg<br>characters: Clint Barton/Natasha Romanoff  
>warnings: canon-typical injuries<p>

summary: Deals, horses, hearts and arms: some things aren't meant to be broken.

author's note: For anuna_81's prompt of 'Wild West AU' and hufflepuffsneak's 'AU! Natasha rides horses. Clint steals horses (among other things).' at the be_compromised 2014 promptathon. Liberties taken with the California Gold Rush and most everything else.

_mustang heart_

There is dust in his mouth, dust in his eyes, and over the sound of hooves and his brother's cursing, Clint tries to push himself to his feet on the pounded ground. The bolt of sheer pain that radiates through his arm at the movement is enough to make the night go blindingly white, erasing everything except the knowledge that this has gone horribly wrong.

_Click-click_.

Clint eases back into the dirt, shifting his weight onto his shoulders, and knows before his vision clears that there's a shotgun pointed at his head.

She is confident and poised, staring down the barrel at him with only the highlights in her hair catching a far-away lantern, and the scent of oil from Barney's broken lamp overrides the smell of horse shit and copper as he looks up at her.

"The card-cheat from _Stark's._ Why am I not surprised?" Her accent doesn't butcher the words, their cool disdain, but her face is shadowed enough to hide any expression. He watches her, waiting for a shot; when it does not come he raises his right hand, fingers spreading in a universal sign.

"I'm not armed."

She snorts faintly.

"One-armed, perhaps. Broken?" The muzzle of her gun remains fixed on his sternum, on the torn shirt and varied sweat stains soaking through the thin fabric.

"Think so," Clint replies, hearing his voice begin to show the sharp edges of pain.

"Arina has good aim," she tells him with what might be satisfaction. "Mine is better. Why should I let you live, thief?"

"Because you'll need me to stop my brother," he says finally, the corners of his mouth tight with pain. "Pierce offered $100 for his horse, and $200 for your life. And Barney ain't the losing kind."

"Neither is Pierce," the Russian tells him, her features lost in the darkness. "But then again, neither am I." And it could be a trick of the starlight, but Clint thinks he sees the white gleam of teeth. "Arina is the bait he dangled in front of me that I could not resist, and she is mine now."

"I got that impression." He draws another breath, fighting against the pain, and risks lowering his hand to cradle his broken arm. "And I can help you."

There it is again, that faint sound of disbelief, but after a silent moment she lowers the shotgun.

"I doubt it. Come, you'll need to have that set."

(Her scarf wrapped as a sling around his shoulder, Doc Banner's small shanty in front of him, Clint can still smell the reek of harsh lye and horse sweat - and underneath it all, the faintest floral hint.)

x

He limps back along the crowded streets the next morning, another grime-streaked face in the sea of dust-coated prospectors, and finds her home again on the edges of the sprawling tent city. The knock on hardened canvas leads to a cloud of steam when she pushes it aside, her face flushed with heat, her eyes taking him in and narrowing.

"I was serious last night," Clint says before she can send him away. The pistol in his pocket is a heavy weight, its metal meaning more than simple protection, but he has nothing more to offer her. The Russian's lips twitch, the only betrayal of any humor; they're full, he can see now, a red to match her hair and cheeks.

"No thanks for sparing you, no thanks for lending you my scarf. And Americans say Russians have terrible manners." There is a dry wit in the drawled words and only the briefest hint of fear in her gaze, the shadow of Pierce's bounty and its threats. She stands tall before him, unbowed by cowardice, unashamed of her alien status and the understanding that no one will help her, and Clint wants, he realizes, to make sure she can stay standing.

He opens his mouth, closes it, and retrieves her scarf from his back pocket with his good hand.

"I'm sorry."

She takes the messily folded fabric back, a sweat-soaked curl slipping from her piled braids and down the side of her temple.

"Your brother, he will come again?"

Clint nods, because Barney is ruthless, Barney is dogged and willing to do what it takes, whatever it takes, and only their argument had convinced him to settle for the horse.

Who knows what Pierce will offer or Barney plot now?

She lets out a breath, raking him over with those gray eyes, and nods.

"Then come, have a seat, and tell me everything you know about Pierce and your brother. I will not lose my horse or my life to them," she says determinedly, and gestures him into the choking heat of her tent. "Do you even know my name?"

"Natasha." Clint can answer that, the name ringing from Pierce's white-knuckled curses and gritted, seething rage. She lets the tent flap close behind him and steps back to her pots, clothing roiling in the bubbling waters.

"And yours?"

"Barton," he replies to the proud set of her shoulders, the smooth line of her back, and finds a seat on a half-broken crate. "Clint Barton."

(Card-cheats, thieves, rustlers, robbers. He doesn't explain their sordid past to her - and thinks she can read between the lines well enough to know.)

x

He follows her to the makeshift corral, half-rotten boards propped more for appearance than effectiveness around a small circle of cleared ground. The half-wild creature that tried to kill him three days before turns into a pliable animal under Natasha's touch, arching her neck and letting her lips quiver as the lye-roughened hands move over sensitive spots.

"I know the heart of broken things," she says, stroking the mare's smooth hide, and Clint doesn't miss the understanding in her sunlit gaze. "The hate, the heat of it."

(Wondering who gave her bruises, wondering who she escaped, is pointless. He has no doubts that she is whole now and healed - or perhaps only healed. Of all people, he should know the two are not the same.)

x

His hopes that his presence has dissuaded Barney fall on the eighth night, when lights and shadows illuminate the tent's interior. They make a stand in the shadows between the corral and her home, aiming for the men lit by their own lanterns, taking out the drifters Barney has persuaded to join him as they ransack her small space. When Barney comes around the side, his own lantern abandoned and his hands gripping gun and knife with equal ease, Natasha is not as forgiving as before.

(Clint catches Sheriff Rogers on the way to the jail and recounts the incident, leading him back as they talk. They find Natasha standing over Barney with her shotgun aimed at his heart, while his brother clutches the tourniquet around his leg and swears with breathless rage.)

x

Natasha says nothing the next morning when he wakes, stiff equally from a tension that has bled away overnight and from sleeping on a blanket salvaged from the destruction. She continues scrubbing at the blood on her belongings as he sits, noting the sorted piles of clothing, the pots that have been returned to their proper places, the dark stains on her apron as she kneels in the wreckage of her home and works her knuckles raw again.

(She does not look at him when he finds a bucket and fetches water for a tub, or starts the fire so she can clean her clothes, but in the steeled lines of her features Clint can make out a defensive edge that ebbs when he returns, and returns again.

When he beds down again in his accustomed spot, guarding the rear entrance, Natasha does not say anything - and neither does he.)

x

"Feeling better?" She asks, eying his arm critically as Clint grips the stirring pole with both hands experimentally.

"We'll see," he returns, a half grin on his lips, and wraps his left fingers around the wood.

(Slowly but surely, he's regaining that strength.)

x

"We do what we must to survive," Natasha murmurs to the gold-red mare that snatches eagerly at the proffered armfuls of dried grass. "My Arina." With reverence, with affection, with a love he would not have thought the removed Russian capable of had he met her in the streets three weeks ago, she waits as the scarred horse buries her nose in hay that takes every cent that can be spared, and more than a few that cannot.

(Clint does not ask if she has ridden her, if there is makeshift tack tucked somewhere out of sight, or if some things are too sacred to be bridled.)

x

His good hand brushes across a scrap of cloth tucked along the dress waist, a silk packet that snags on his fingertips as they find the unmistakable shape of a ring inside. He pauses, wondering, hesitating - and her fingers settle on his, work-roughened and gentle. She cups his face with her other hand, turning it up.

"Old memories," she tells him, as if that is all the explanation he needs. In the oil-lit glow of the tent, her skin pale before him and a warmth in her shadowed gaze, Clint finds it is.

(He lifts his head for her kiss, slow and rocking and warm, and closes his eyes.)

x

The coins make sounds louder than they should as he lays them on the table, gleaming in the light of the late afternoon sun. Natasha gazes at them, her expression locked down as it has not been in weeks, before lifting her gray gaze to him for an explanation.

"I found work," Clint begins, wrestling with nerves he had not anticipated. "Down at the blacksmith's. Thor's been looking for another set of hands and I can learn my way around fast enough. Now that I finally have two hands, anyway."

She says nothing, watching him, waiting, a contained energy in her shoulders that makes him think of Arina, of dust and daylight.

"I can actually help out," he continues, leaving his fingers flat on the table despite the urge to drum them in staccato patterns. "With everything."

At last she shifts, angling towards him, still searching his face as she must have on the half-moon night they first met. She lifts a hand and reaches across the table, fingertips alighting on his own with a cautiousness he hasn't seen from her in days, in weeks.

Clint turns his hand over, curling his weakened fingers around hers with an ease he had feared he might never regain, and holds on.

Natasha does too.

x

(She slips across the gleaming back, hands knotted in the tangled mane, her skirt an afterthought that hitches up around her knees and rides up her thighs. Arina snorts, ears flicked back as she jigs slowly sideways, and Natasha grins with a fierce joy that seems brighter than the morning sun.

"Let's go," she tells the mare, and Clint holds the gate open as they fly from the small corral.

Dust rises in their wake as he watches them run, sure in the knowledge that they are free – and that they will be coming back home.)

_fin_


End file.
